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- [00:00]
John Podhoretz
Have I Got News for you is back for another season. Roy Wood Jr. Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black are finding the funny in the week's biggest stories. Have I Got News for you? Saturday at 9 on CNN and stream.
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Abe Greenwald
Next day on Max.
- [00:19]
John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:26]
Seth Mandel
Some drink champagne Some die of thirst.
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John Podhoretz
No way of know which way it's.
- [00:33]
Seth Mandel
Going Hope for the best, expect the worst.
- [00:40]
John Podhoretz
Welcome to the Commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, February 28th, 2025. Yes, we have reached the end of the second month of 2025. I'm John Pod Horitz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [00:57]
John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [00:59]
Rob Long
Hi, John.
- [01:00]
John Podhoretz
And very noisily clanging in the background as many, many accoutrements today are Hollywood Commentary columnist, producer of executive producer of six network television shows, author of the Martini Shot, both a column and a podcast on the Ankler Network, and the co creator of Ricochet, Rob Long. Hi, Rob.
- [01:26]
Seth Mandel
Hey, John.
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John Podhoretz
Who canceled Christine Rose?
- [01:30]
Seth Mandel
Okay, okay. I know that I'm replacing somebody. I never know. I just want to know who it was whose shoes I'm filling. It's not like you wanted me. It's like you wanted somebody else and they said no, so you had to come to me.
- [01:42]
John Podhoretz
You know, in the 70s, not to get too old, but you know, Johnny Carson used to have two guest hosts a week. At some point his contract got so distended that he was like, they'll pay him $100 million to be on the show once a week. And then he would have guest hosts. One day he had the guest host, Dick Sean on, who was a sort of an actor of the 60s and 70s, probably best known for playing the hippie and the producers. And Dick Sean decided to do a bit and he overturned Johnny Carson's desk. He pushed it over to have a hilarious moment and he was blackballed for the rest of car tenure. So, Rob, I don't want you pushing over your desk. I won't.
- [02:29]
Seth Mandel
But Dick Sean famously died on stage. You know, he died on stage.
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John Podhoretz
Oh, that's right.
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Seth Mandel
And people thought it was a bit. For like five minutes he sat there and died. And just people thought, this is hilarious, but this is talking about commitment.
- [02:43]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah. You know who else died on Albert Brooks's and Super Dave Osborne. Bob Einstein's father played Funkhouser on Kruger Enthusiasm. Their father was a radio famous radio comedian who went by the name of Parkya Carcass was being honored at a dinner in Los Angeles in 1958 and keeled over and died on the dais.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah.
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John Podhoretz
So that's how you're going out with your boots on. Yes.
- [03:10]
Seth Mandel
So now that we know that no one is listening to this anymore, this.
- [03:15]
John Podhoretz
Is always your bit. People love this stuff. And we're going to talk about show business in the second half of the show because the Oscars are this weekend and there are some interesting things to be said about the Oscars and about Oscar season. But before we do that, did you know that Donald Trump never called Vladimir Zelensky a dictator? Because I didn't know that because I heard him calling him a dictator last week. And then yesterday in a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said, did I say that? I didn't say that. About whether or not Zelensky was a dictator. Zelensky, of course, coming to the White House today to sign whatever this minerals deal, which is all putative or forward thinking because in fact, there's not a lot of mineral mining going on in the Ukraine as in Ukraine as the war is going on. But Trump wants repayment.
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Rob Long
And also the only mines that have previously been mined already are currently in Russia held territory. So good luck.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. So anyway, congratulations to Donald Trump for negotiating a future minerals deal with Ukraine. We don't know where this goes. We know two things. Trump and Marco Rubio and everybody are saying we want to bring this war to an end as soon as possible. Which of course everybody wants wars to end as soon as possible as long as the results of the ending of the war are favorable to the parties that want to end it. And that's always the question with, with a country like Ukraine, which the initial thinking was they were going to basically have a peace and surrender negotiated up on top of them and forced shoved down their throats by the United States. Things appear to be a little more complicated than that. Europe starting to actually make security guarantees. And Trump saying in his 2,200hour press conference cabinet meeting that he thought that, you know, look, there are going to be Americans working in Ukraine harvesting all of these rare earth minerals and that will function as a deterrent to Russian aggression because Russia isn't going to want to be killing American workers who are, you know, who are in the mines. So this story, like all other stories about Trump, can't take it quite at face value. Don't quite know what's going on. Abe, as our resident person who's actually been to Ukraine, maybe you have some thoughts.
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Abe Greenwald
Well, not really. As a result of that. But more on Trump. Yeah. To me, the Ukraine proposal is starting to look more and more like his Gaza plan in, in its sort of vagueness. And even though he's saying, we're right there, we're going to get there, the sense I get from the European leaders visiting him, not talking about the coming of Zelensky, but the, you know, Macron and Starmer is that they're trying to cajole him in some direction. And I don't know to what degree they're succeeding at all. And there's just this sort of, the bonds of reality around the whole thing are very loose and seem to be getting looser. And I don't, I don't really understand what's happening. I mean, even John, when you talk about his saying that, he doesn't remember calling Zelensky a dictator. It's sort of like there's just a big fog around this. The whole thing is sort of atomizing as it's supposedly coming together. But I see more of the atomization than I see what he claims, which is we're getting closer. And he also says it has to happen soon or it won't happen at all, which sounds desperate. It doesn't sound sure to me.
- [07:21]
John Podhoretz
Well, either sounds desperate or it sounds like, okay, well, you know what, this may not work, and then the war is going to continue and I guess we as America are not going to participate as much in it as we were before, if at all. So the Europeans will have to step up. But the, but his insistence that he's the one who wants to end the war, he's going to bring the war to end. There are too many people dying on both sides. It's just heart sick. There's just so, so much death. And apparently the Russians don't care about the death. And it's not that the Ukrainians don't care about the death, but the Ukrainians have their national sovereignty and the fear of being swallowed up by a totalitarian monster, as they were 100 years ago by, by, by the Soviet Union, is stronger than their desire to conclude the war on terms unfavorable to them. And so maybe he's acknowledging that the I can end this in a day fantasy is a fantasy. He's just like backing away from the idea that only he can solve.
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Rob Long
Yeah. So he also said if the deal doesn't work, I think that they're gonna move all the Ukrainians to Jordan and Egypt.
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Seth Mandel
Right.
- [08:35]
John Podhoretz
Maybe the Ukrainians can do the demolition work in Gaza in preparation for digging the rare Earth minerals out.
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Rob Long
But also. But the more on a more serious note, this is part of what Trump, like life with Trump is, which is that there is no yesterday. We just sort of have to get used to, again, there never having been anything in the past that has ever happened. And so it can be discombobulating because we know he said, we remember. He said this about Zelensky.
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John Podhoretz
He's remember, it wasn't that long ago.
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Rob Long
You know, it's like. It's like my grandfather used to say, like, we said, pop, you don't remember. Say, I don't remember what I had for breakfast this morning. That's Trump now. You know, it's like, but we remember what you had. I watched you eat oatmeal. So. But we, you know, so we have to just get used to this. Like, whatever happened yesterday doesn't matter. And that's an extremely maddening thing if you're another country rather than, you know, the media here. I'm sort of used to it.
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Abe Greenwald
I just want to point this out, too, because I think sometimes people miss this about Trump. He also does it with a kind of wink. You know, they get. People get crazy. And he goes, you know, he said.
- [09:43]
John Podhoretz
I said that. What?
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Abe Greenwald
I would say such a thing. I don't know. You know, there's a half joke to it, which I don't think is healthy either. I mean, not that it would be good if it were a earnest denial either, but it goes to the meaninglessness of all of the developments. Everything could be a joke. Maybe it didn't happen. That's where you're sort of left completely unmoored.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Seth Mandel
I mean, the problem is, not only is there was no yesterday, it's not clear that there's a tomorrow either. It's not clear there's a strategy here. It seems a little bit like, I'm just trying to get through this meeting, and I'm gonna try to. I'm gonna wait around and I'm gonna splash the water, and then pretty soon the caravan will move on and we'll talk about something else. In the meantime, though, there are all these weird, very, to me, very worrying kind of signs of this kind of utopian way of thinking about things. Like, let me tell you something about Gaza, man. It's a beautiful beach. We could have a big. As if that. Those beaches are unique. I mean, like. Well, he's been to Tel Aviv. It's been beautiful beaches there. They're not that far. You don't have to. There's no market for a resort. In Gaza that just doesn't, doesn't exist. You know, they have all these minerals. We're going to have all these, these, the mines of them, Ukraine. It's not going to happen. The idea that you can only that every, every time you sell, you have to sell something that's going to be a giant windfall for you is, is, is worrying because of course there aren't any windfalls. We live in a world that, where these things don't happen. It was like when we invaded Iraq and people were saying, oh, we're going to get their oil, it's going to be great. Well, that's actually not going to happen. So this is what I then it's to sit there and watch the, you know, the picture of Keir Starmer there in the Oval Office and you see he's surrounded by these eunuchs, these sort of nodding, you know, eunuchs in light blue suits like Marco Rubio, who's like sort of utterly emasculated sort of nodding as this nonsense is being unfolded. It's strange. It's like everyone has turned into Pete Hegseth voluntarily, which is such a strange thing.
- [11:56]
John Podhoretz
So there's a trade off question if you're Marco Rubio or if you're one of the people around Trump. Right? So Marco Rubio has to endorse this or say what is he saying about Ukraine? Which is exactly the opposite of what he would have said about Ukraine a year ago. Or maybe not the opposite, but certainly, you know, at least 45 to 90 degrees departure from where he was before. Right. But he also gets to cut Maduro off. Right? That's. So one thing he announced yesterday is that we are ending all forms of support of any kind, any American dollars going to Venezuela, which effectively prop up this communist dictatorship in Venezuela. And if you're Rubio, I think you can say to yourself, I'm stomaching one so I can get the other. Right? I mean, nothing is unmixed in this world. And if I can get, if I can do the things that might be necessary to finally rid the world of this monstrous regime, which also has, has had rippling consequences for the energy markets on the planet because Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves on the planet. That's good, right? That's, that's part of the way people got through the first administration until it turned out that they could no longer stomach or could or try. They were just crossw of Trump and could no longer last. I want to move on to one, the comic scene of yesterday because it is indicative of the problem of appointing people who are not even remotely serious about what they do. And I'm referring here to Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and the release of the Epstein documents. Epstein documents. So Pam Bondi says, I have the Epstein documents on my desk.
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Rob Long
Who.
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John Podhoretz
Boy, they're going to blow your head. They're going to blow your mind. It's crazy how amazing. They are releasing them tomorrow. And then Cash Patel releases the documents. And they are Epstein's phone book. Right? His. Like his. His Filofax or Rolodex or whatever, you know, his phone book. And then that's what there is to release. And so she says, I demand an immediate investigation into the FBI for why it hasn't released more of the Epstein file. But she told us that the Epstein file was on her desk. She said, it's sitting right in front of me. So why doesn't she hand it to. To, you know, I don't know. Evita Duffy, Alonso report, you know, cub reporter, give her a big scoop because they weren't on her desk. She doesn't know what's in it. Chances are very good there are no Epstein documents. By which I mean, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't keeping physical paper on the people that he was blackmailing. Like, people like that, like Meyer Lansky, had it all in their heads. That's what made them successful gangsters, was that they were able to run and control and contain the, the world of their organized crime by having it in their brains.
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Rob Long
Well, that's the famous, you know, from the Wire that everybody always quotes. You know, you take notes on a criminal effing conspiracy. That's, you know, that's what you don't do.
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John Podhoretz
Right.
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Rob Long
That's why the line is funny.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Rob Long
Which is why you take notes on a criminal conspiracy.
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John Podhoretz
But that's why, that's why the Mafia was broken up when they actually went to the wire, when they wiretapped all of the Mafia headquarters. So all I'm saying is that's the Attorney General of the United States and the FBI director getting into a fight. She writes him a formal letter demanding that he released to her, to her his documents that she said she had on her desk. Now, yeah, this is no way to run a railroad, people, particularly if what you're trying to do is satisfy psychotic conspiracy theorists. Now, by the way, I do think there was a. There's a conspiracy around Epstein. I believe that he was probably murdered in jail. I don't care what Bill Barr says.
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Seth Mandel
Wow, I didn't know that I'm serious.
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John Podhoretz
And I do think, and I do think that there are many, many people whose lives would be ruined if we found out the extent of their connections with Jeffrey Epstein. And therefore there is some kind of conspiracy. But I don't think that there is paper on that conspiracy. In fact, in 2008, the federal government made a deal with Epstein in 2008, 2008, that would have effectively ended any surveillance of him or any effort. But what's going on with him?
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Seth Mandel
You just said 2008. John, do you ever get a sense that, like, there are so many people now in this new Trump administration who are just aren't done yet talking about. I mean, I expect them tomorrow to have a big press conference on Benghazi. You know, these are people who are still stuck in these weird. Who cares about Epstein? I really, I cannot bestir myself to care about it. The idea that the Attorney General and the head of the FBI are talking about it as if somehow we're going to find this, oh, you know who you know is Hillary. Like, Hillary, really. I mean, these people are stuck in these old wars.
- [17:22]
Abe Greenwald
It's.
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Seth Mandel
I mean, I don't know. I mean, I hate to. I'm not trying to drink. Mail piece.
- [17:26]
John Podhoretz
But, you know, by them, this is a new war.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, but it's not, it's not to anybody else. I mean, I don't think that's true.
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John Podhoretz
Because it's a new war. Because what they want is the Kennedy files. Those are 60 years old. Or they wanted. They want the Roswell Area 51. Those are 80 years old. Like, that's. They're not.
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Seth Mandel
I'll go for those.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, I'll go for those. This is like the Grammy new artist thing where Epstein is concerned. You know, he's like, he's like doja cat. They're like, you know, Engelbert Humperdinck. But as you may know, if you watch on. Yeah, you watch on YouTube, you can see my Engelbert Humperdinck album over my, over my right shoulder.
- [18:10]
Abe Greenwald
Anyway, but the Epstein story, I mean, Rob, I agree with you, I don't care, but it has taken on the sort of Kennedy like proportions. Here it is. People who are interested in it are obsessed with it. There's graffiti in my neighborhood that says, you know, Epstein was murdered or Epstein was killed.
- [18:36]
Rob Long
John wrote that.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, yeah, right. No, no.
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Abe Greenwald
But it is a particular interest of people who believe that the world is being.
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Seth Mandel
It's an attorney general and they're being lied to. Like, I mean, yeah, they should be investing QAnon then.
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John Podhoretz
But they are. They are. This is the thing. This is the mainstreaming. You can start this 15 years ago with the sort of rise in independent podcasting, independent radio state, you know, people, Alex Jones, people like that, getting into the public discussions. And their line is, there's always a story behind the story. The story that you're being fed is a lie. It's all to cover up for the people in power. And this is a major motivating factor behind a significant element of the Trump base. Yeah, they believe this. And the problem is that the Epstein story, alone among the stories of the last 15 years, kind of conforms to the idea that something very untoward was going on here. Why did the head of Apollo, Leon Black, just give Epstein $158 million for a piece of tax advice? Yeah, why?
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Seth Mandel
What did. And what did Gene Hackman and his wife know?
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John Podhoretz
Well, that's. Yes. Yeah, yeah. What did they know? Randy Quaid is asking that very quickly.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, Randy Quaid apparently. Check the neighborhood. Maybe John is spray painting that.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. Randy Quaid said this morning on Twitter that Gene Hackman gets a lot of money from residuals and therefore somebody killed him for the residuals money, which is interesting because I doubt he really gets a lot in residuals.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah, not at this point.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah, no, nor. Nor would he have, since movies don't have residuals.
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Seth Mandel
That's true.
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John Podhoretz
Well, they do, don't they? They have kind of. But it's not like they don't have residuals like TV shows. And he hasn't been on TV and, you know, since he was on the naked city 80 years ago or whatever. So I don't think he's got a lot of money coming in that way. But, yeah, every celebrity, everything where they can. And this goes to Abe. Let's talk about your ongoing point, which is that one of the things that's going on in America is that we don't get answers about things anymore. Things are not resolved. And that creates this atmosphere that they're not resolved because somebody is stopping them from being resolved. Not because we've gotten incompetent or because we hold out hope because of pop culture, because of CSI and NCIS and shows like that, that everything could be solved by the lab guys find a strand of hair and it'll prove that, you know, ex industrialists killed, you know, had so and so killed in prison.
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Abe Greenwald
But it really, I mean, I do think a large part of it is because of incompetence, but that that feeds the suspicion. Nevertheless.
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John Podhoretz
I mean, yeah, or. Or. Or human nature. It's not incompetence, exactly. It feels like it's incompetence because we used to get answers on things. But then there must have been many. Many. There are many, many. We don't know who the Zodiac killer was. There are many things we don't know that in historical terms were not knowable because there was no way to find them out, and technology wasn't there, and our ability to follow things wasn't there and all of that. It's not like it's anything new. No one knew where Judge Crater went. No one. You know, nobody knew who killed the Black Dahlia. You know, there are all kinds of unsolved cases in the history of mankind now. We think, well, all cases should be solvable.
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Abe Greenwald
The culture also was more trusting back then. So if someone said case closed, the public was more likely to accept it.
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John Podhoretz
Right?
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Abe Greenwald
I mean, they've said that Epstein wasn't murdered.
- [22:39]
John Podhoretz
Right?
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Abe Greenwald
That's as you said. Bill Barr said that there might have been a time a few decades earlier when people would have accepted that.
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Rob Long
Wasn'T there. Like, so the other aspect to the comic scene that John was describing was who were getting presented.
- [22:58]
John Podhoretz
Right.
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Rob Long
We didn't get to the binders part where they were presented. Influencers were presented with the binders at the White House 15 minutes ahead of whenever it was put online, Right. And they had these big binders that said Epstein files. And, you know, one of them wasn't the Pizzagate guy. One of the influencers who was given a binder, wasn't he?
- [23:23]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, yeah.
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Rob Long
There's like a circular thing here.
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John Podhoretz
We got libs of TikTok, D.C. drano. Drano, yeah, he'll get to the. And then a couple of other. A couple of other people's.
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Rob Long
And that's. That's.
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John Podhoretz
Give a. If I could just do a quick intervention. Libs of TikTok. It's been a wonderful Twitter account for several years. Mistreated, you know, like deplatformed, all of that. Her name was Chaya. She's an orthodox Jew. Chaya, you are spinning out of control. Get yourself start. You've done very good work. We're your friends. Get away from these people. They're driving you crazy and they are ruining your Twitter feed and they are harming your influence. And I think you might listen to us. So take my advice. You are going down the wrong path. Okay? That's my message to Chaya of Libs of TikTok. But yeah, look, Jacob Weisberg once said, I Think very amusingly that there was a reason why Hollywood loved conspiracy plots, right? Like Hollywood loved to make the thing about, oh, it's secretly, it's the businessman who is doing not the da, da, da. And all of that. And he said it's because that's actually how Hollywood works. People are always plotting against everybody else. I just read a really good book. Kenneth Turan has written a book on Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer for the Jewish Live series at Yale. Kenneth Terran, longtime movie critic and writer for the Los Angeles Times. And Thalberg and Mayer were the two great picture producers of the golden age of the 1930s. And Thalberg died young at 37. And the entire story that they tell is mayor scheming against Thalberg or people scheming against each other. This is how Hollywood began. They were all hardscrabble, working class guys who didn't want things taken away from them. They were plotting. And so Hollywood was born as a kind of conspiracy factory. And so they have retailed the conspiracy theories to us about how America really works because that's how their business actually works. ROB and so I think that that's something that because of popular culture's love of the conspiracy plot, now everybody kind of like gives into the conspiracy plot. Rob does this comport with your.
- [25:51]
Seth Mandel
It's a great idea. It's funny in that. I mean, I just think the larger point is that it's easy to think ill of the world if you work in Hollywood where it all seems like, chaotic and evil. I just, I think mostly people feel in show business that it's just, it is fat chaos and that no one really has a. It's a, it's a power vacuum. No one is actually in an office plotting against you specifically. They're just in an office like rats in a coffee can. They'll go anywhere. The, the conspiracy theory movement seems to me to be sort of this neurotic need from people to believe that there are grownups in charge of everything, whether they're malevolent grownups or not. It's like a Gnostic, right? It's like the. You have to believe that there's. The demiurge is in charge. It's sort of the same one. It's one thing or the other. The God, demiurge, you know, devil doesn't matter to me as long as there's a plan and a plot here. And I, and I. And it's also an excuse for why my life is so miserable because, well, obviously I'm not an oil company. The big chemical companies want me to feel this way. And then every now and then, you'll meet somebody who's like, usually, in my experience, very, very talented. Almost always an actor, very, very talented. And you'll have this conversation with that person and it'll be fun. And then suddenly they'll say, well, you know, steel doesn't melt at a certain temperature. And you think, oh, no.
- [27:18]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Seth Mandel
I remember standing in front of. At the craft services table with one of the crew and just having a donut and coffee and just talking about nothing. And he said, well, you know.
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John Podhoretz
The.
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Seth Mandel
Jews only let us think what they, you know, certain things. And he sort of sauntered off. I was like, hey, come back here. You're in show business. You can't say that. But, you know, it's like, if only.
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John Podhoretz
If only that were true.
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Seth Mandel
If only that were true. Yeah.
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John Podhoretz
By the way, quick shout out to our friend Eli Lake. His podcast Breaking History, which is his current episode, is literally about this. It's about the JFK conspiracy through the ages and how Oliver Stone's movie jfk, may be the most influential piece of popular culture ever produced because it did literally cause the writing of the legislation to declassify the JFK files back in 1992 or 93, when the movie came out, that are finally being. That supposedly we're about to get our. Get our hands on. And that, of course, the secret, as he says, is that if the files do not reveal that Oswald was, you know, didn't do it and whoever else did it, that these files were compromised and that they were the. The real evidence long since destroyed. So who needs the files? So anyway, it's a wonderful podcast at Breaking History, Eli's podcast. So talking about show business this weekend, Sunday night, we have the culmination of months of planning an event that used to be a major American event on par with the super bowl and is now a not particularly major event on par with nothing. That is, of course, the. I think it's the 97th annual Academy Awards, easily the cultural. The pop cultural event of the year throughout my childhood and adolescence and young adulthood. Now, I think they're lucky to get 14, 15 million people to watch it, if that. Whereas, of course, the super bowl is watched by 115 million people or something like that. So used to be 40 or 50 million people would watch the Oscars. So now the Oscars exist as a. As a. As a moment of crisis. Like, it's the point where people write the pieces about how the movies don't matter. Anymore. And this is the end. Movies and only streaming. And what used to be that people like to watch that, now they don't. And no one goes to the theaters and all that. Rob, you are. You are not someone who has worked in the motion picture part.
- [29:56]
Seth Mandel
God. I'm a writer.
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John Podhoretz
We're.
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Seth Mandel
Writers don't work in movies.
- [29:58]
John Podhoretz
Right? Yeah. Yeah. You know that. You know the great joke about the. As you know, the greatest. Excuse me. Polish joke.
- [30:06]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah. Now going to tell the greatest Polish joke. You'll excuse me. I would call it stupid person joke. And I'm awash in admiration for. For the Polish people.
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Seth Mandel
Wow. Talking about. How could you. Could you ruin the setup even more? I don't know.
- [30:21]
John Podhoretz
No, it's like. Do you know about the Polish starlet on the. On the. On the motion picture. In order to get a bigger part, she. She slept with the writer.
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Seth Mandel
Yeah. The way to tell the joke, just, just like. Did you hear about the Polish actress? She slept with a writer. You don't need all the other stuff.
- [30:42]
John Podhoretz
You don't say slept with because that, that also that's. You got to use the harsher.
- [30:48]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. But either way, fewer words. You don't need the whole thing.
- [30:52]
John Podhoretz
Okay. Yeah. So that's. So you're a writer and so you're not in. You're not. This is not a thing for you working in the motion picture business. But the client of the motion picture business and the prestige in the motion picture business has had effects down the. Down the. Down the chain. I think like movies not being central cultural events anymore lowers pop culture's ability to create major cultural events. And.
- [31:20]
Seth Mandel
Well, it lowers Hollywood's ability to do that.
- [31:25]
John Podhoretz
Right, but I mean, the massification. Right. So you have the ability of things to drive cultural conversations. That's. Movies used to drive cultural conversations in the United States. For now. I've also, I've said this before on this podcast, like the motion picture industry really began 110 years ago with Charlie Chaplin in 1915 becoming the world's most famous person. And the creation of Birth of a Nation, the first giant mega hit that was ever released. It's 110 years. That's a long time for a medium to dominate the culture.
- [32:01]
Seth Mandel
I've said that on the pages of Commentary. This is time to take a breath.
- [32:05]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. With the Oscars coming there for. All we can now watch for is the politics. That's the problem. The problem is that nobody cares about what wins. And the two movies that are really up for best picture are the, like the Leading candidates. There are three, but let's say there are two. That's Honora and the brutalist. Each has made about $15 million at the box office, which means that they've sold, you know, a million tickets each. As opposed to say Oppenheimer, which sold 40 million tickets or 50 million tickets or something like that by the time its run was over. So no one's seen them. No one in America has seen them. Many people will not have heard of Anora or the Brutal. The only movie that seems to still be in the running that did have some audience like 75 million. The box office is Conclave, the movie about the eerily well timed movie about the.
- [33:09]
Seth Mandel
Sure.
- [33:09]
John Podhoretz
About the death of a Pope and the College of Cardinals picking a new pope, which you'd almost think somebody did something at the Vatican to Pope Francis to get this in the news, to help, to help the author.
- [33:20]
Seth Mandel
I didn't realize you had more room in your brain for conspiracies. It seemed to me that you're filled with Epstein and QAnon.
- [33:26]
Rob Long
So now we're going to add the.
- [33:27]
Seth Mandel
The. Yeah.
- [33:29]
John Podhoretz
QED. So let's just talk about politics and the Oscars. Two issues. One issue involving three. Two issues involving policy. One trans. Trans issue very much interrupted by the fact that the first trans nominee for. For an Academy Award, Carlo Sophia Gaston, Gaston, the star, the titular character in Amelia Perez, was found to have issued tweets that people have deemed racist and anti immigration and all of that. So you're not going to vote for the WOKE nominee if the WOKE nominee is anti Woke?
- [34:11]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [34:12]
John Podhoretz
Right. If you're casting a woke vote, that person's got to be woke down the line. She's got to be welcoming in illegal aliens. She's got to be talking about how wonderful it is that there's representation for under people. And she did the opposite in Spanish in 2021.
- [34:32]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [34:32]
John Podhoretz
Some enterprising anti Amelia Perez Oscar campaigner, dirty trickster went and looked.
- [34:39]
Seth Mandel
Well. Yeah. The PMK for the other people. Yeah, right, right.
- [34:42]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. But someone who actually they said, you know what, you read Spanish, go read your Twitter feed.
- [34:47]
Rob Long
Yeah.
- [34:48]
Seth Mandel
Find out everything you can about the people, the people that you are just honored to be nominated with.
- [34:52]
John Podhoretz
Yeah. So trans. I don't know what they're doing about trans. That was their big play for trans. It's sort of like off the table. So now we have basically Israel and Gaza. So I just want to give people a guide to the Israel and Gaza issue. One is the Red Hand. Seth, can you explain the Red hand issue.
- [35:16]
Rob Long
Yeah, sure. I. So they're Artists for Ceasefire is like a pro Palestinian pressure group that coordinates protests among, well, artists and, you know, actors and famous people. And so they. They wear a pin that is also, I think, the kind of insignia of the Artist for Ceasefire that is a red hand. They say it's orange, so maybe it's orange with red, you know, lasik around it, but it's a red hand, and it's held out in front, palm forward, like it's giving you a high five. And. And it's meant to signify the support for the Palestinians. However, the sign, the hand out is actually from one of the more infamous events of the Intifada, when a couple.
- [36:20]
John Podhoretz
Intifada was 25 years ago, right, When.
- [36:23]
Rob Long
A couple of Israelis wandered into the wrong area and they were taken to the police station by Palestinian police who were theoretically going to protect them from mobs and turn them over to the Israelis. That's the policy when Israelis get lost. And the mob overcame. I don't know how much resistance there really was, but the mob broke in and with their bare hands killed these two Israelis. And one of them, one of the perpetrators, held up his bloody hand to the window to show the crowd outside to which they had tossed one of the bodies to proof of murder. Right, and which they had tossed one of the bodies to the crowd from there. And that hand, and that picture became very famous, and that hand is the model for that. And so the pin that they're going to be wearing, they're going to say, well, it's, you know, it's all. It's really orange. It's not red, it's burnt, magenta. How can you call it red? It's obviously, you know, chartreuse or so. But, you know, the larger point is that even if you take them at their word, you have to understand how disingenuous that is. The Red Right hand is one of the oldest cities, symbols in popular culture of bloody revenge. It is. I mean, it goes back to the very beginning. It goes to, you know, to Dante, right. I mean, is that the first appearance of it? It signifies bloody revenge. And so you can move from that all the way through to the Troubles, Ireland, and the Red Right hand. And everywhere the red Right hand has been used. In fact, it was even the theme song to Peaky Blinders, which tells you why that connection is. The Red Right hand has always symbolized that. And so even if you want to pretend you didn't know the thing about the intifada, that's first of all, second of all, now we all know everybody has been informed they did this last year at the award shows. They wore the pins. They were told what it represented. And so what we're waiting to see is knowing that that's now, knowing that that's what it represents. Will they wear the pin again?
- [38:46]
John Podhoretz
So Mark Ruffalo is one of the leading lapels, has one of the leading lapels to hold the red right hand pin. It is within the power of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to refuse to allow people to attend the ceremony if they are wearing the pin. If you've been to a concert, you've been to any major event in the United States in the last four or five years, you can't bring in your phone. Sometimes they give you this fonder bag or the ponder. You put your phone in, they lock it, they give it to you afterwards, literally. Security could stop people as they're coming in saying, please give me that pin and I will put it in a bag and you can pick it up afterwards. They are not doing that. So they are implicitly saying that it's okay for the elite of the motion picture business to come in wearing a sign of Jewish slaughter. Talk about Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer and the moguls who created the industry, Carl Laemmle and Adolph Zucker and all of that. And the Warner brothers assenting in some sense to this display of resistance that is not, you know, non violent, but is literally a celebration of violence. It's, it's, it's almost. It's unthinkable.
- [40:17]
Rob Long
I just want, by the way, I want to correct myself really quickly. I apologize. It's. Paradise Lost is not Dante. I was very late, very tired, had only John Milton's Paradise. Paradise Lost is. Where is the. So it's, you know, nearing another epic poem.
- [40:35]
Seth Mandel
It does matter, but.
- [40:36]
John Podhoretz
Okay, it matters. I'm making a note. I'm making a note for the files for the. Well, we have your severance performance review. You use too many big words and you mentioned too many epic poems.
- [40:51]
Abe Greenwald
But you know, the red hand issue, when Seth says, you know, now that they know what it is, this reminds me of from the river to the Sea, that knowing its origins and its true significance and meaning doesn't stop anyone. I don't, I don't. You know, it's not like, oh, I didn't, I didn't realize this was, this was for violence. I'm maybe increases it. Right, right.
- [41:19]
John Podhoretz
No, look, I mean, when I say they could, they could make them take off their pins. I mean, if they had a pin that was, you know, nambla, if they would wanted to walk in wearing a NAMBLA pin, they wouldn't be allow to walk in wearing an amber pin. But pins that advocate and support the mass slaughter of Jews should be in that category. So that's Israel and Gaza, number one. Israel and Gaza, number two is that among the five nominees for a documentary feature is a film called no Other Land. No Other Land, we are told, has been made by a collective, an Israeli Palestinian collective. Four directors, Baziladra Hamdan Bilal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Zor. An act of resistance on the path to justice during the ongoing conflict in the region. And it's an archive of videos and handmade film. Bad. How terrible is how monstrous and evil Israel is. And so this movie does not have a distributor in the United States, though somehow, mysteriously, it is the highest grossing of the five documentaries nominated. I will assume because they're streaming it on some services for purchase and that Qatar may be buying 150,000 streams to get the numbers up to try to convince people to distribute it in the United States. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's what gutter does. That's the kind of thing you do when you're trying to get something promoted. And there is a lot of talk that it's going to win. And if it wins, there will be a. This is going to be a very, very. It won the best documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, you know, basically, which makes sense because Triumph of the Will, of course, would have also won the Berlin film festival in 1934 had it been released, if there were a Berlin Film Festival. So, you know, it may win. And if it does win, there will be a speech. And it will be this year's version of Jonathan Glazer's speech last year about how Israel is evil and the transformation of the motion picture business from being so sort of like relatively Zionist that when Vanessa Redgrave said Zionist hoodlums were trying to prevent me from winning my Oscar when she won in 1976, and then I think it was somebody else. Paddy Chayefsky came out upon winning his Oscar and said, Vanessa Redgrave is a disgusting and foul monster and an awful person. Patty Chassis, a longtime commentary subscriber, by the way, before his death and of course the author of the most neocon movie ever made network did, did, did go after Vanessa Redgrad. That was the one time the audience booed and it was very, a very big moment. And now of course we're going to see celebration. We may well see celebrations. And so basically, yeah, what that. I think it would be really nice if eventually the Oscars ended up on Tubi. That's what I.
- [44:55]
Seth Mandel
Well, that could be. I mean, the Oscars are closer and closer to like the National Book Awards, right. It's like. Well, that's sort of interesting. You put on the COVID I mean, we don't. I mean, I'm just thinking about this. Before this podcast, I was like, well, what can you say about the Oscars? I think what you can say is that whatever they are or they're going to be, it's not clear. They aren't what they were. They weren't even what they were last year. They have not yet become what they are. It seems like decline. Because it seems like decline, the movie business in general and that this is just about bellwether, that decline. I mean, if whatever the political statements are on Sunday or Monday, whenever it is, they're going to be. Fewer people will see them than ever. There. There are more people know who.
- [45:46]
John Podhoretz
NBC.
- [45:47]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [45:48]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, probably.
- [45:50]
Seth Mandel
Probably. Actually, when you cume up MSNBC over the week, you know, because they replay these things 90,000 times. MSNBC might actually be bigger the.
- [45:59]
Abe Greenwald
The Oscars. They got to bring back the slap.
- [46:03]
John Podhoretz
Oh, we need a new slap. Yeah.
- [46:05]
Seth Mandel
That was the last time. Yeah.
- [46:07]
Rob Long
Well, why not just make it an annual thing with Will Smith? Just have him there every year.
- [46:12]
John Podhoretz
Well, it's like how I met him.
- [46:13]
Rob Long
You don't know when he's going to slap.
- [46:16]
John Podhoretz
Well, it's like the ongoing plot line on How I met your mother is you never knew when the slap was going to come because Jason Siegel owed Neil Patrick Harris a slap.
- [46:30]
Rob Long
That's right.
- [46:30]
John Podhoretz
And this was a running through line. Could have happened anytime. Could have done it more than once. All of that. It is kind of a good running. Running drama. There were Oscars used to have running dramas like fights between Jack Benny and George Burns or. Or Fred Allen or, you know, would Bob Hope like get an honorary Oscar because he would always complain about not getting one or something like that. Anyway, you're right. Here are some aspects of the Oscars that we know about there. They aren't doing songs. There are not going to be any musical numbers. Except apparently it's going to open with a musical number from Wicked, the one nominated musical. I think this was a way of avoiding having numbers from Amelia Perez parading on the Oscars, which though that might be fun for the trans supporting community. ABC maybe thought would not might be alienating for its mass.
- [47:29]
Rob Long
But she will be there, right? She.
- [47:32]
John Podhoretz
Yes, Carla Sophia Gascon, who has been and disappeared down the rabbit hole. Netflix has agreed to pay for her plane ticket. She is a nominee for Best Actress and so her plane ticket has. Netflix has grudgingly agreed with its $18 billion in profit to buy her a plane ticket. They are so mad at her. They really thought they had this one in the bag. They never had it in the bag. It's one of the worst movies ever made. Everybody hates it. Nobody was going to vote for it for Best Picture, in my view. So that was a delusion on Netflix's part. And they can now blame Carlos Sophia Gascon on the fact that they stupidly purchased this awful, unwatchable movie for their service, thinking that they could get an Oscar from it.
- [48:21]
Rob Long
But you know, it's one Oscar will have something to do with music anyway. Right.
- [48:27]
John Podhoretz
Zoe Saldana will likely win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar and I will actually say she is deserving of it. It's the one feature of the movie that isn't unspeakable, I would say.
- [48:38]
Rob Long
I watched just this week one of the Oscar contenders and I enjoyed it. And it's sort of relevant, a real pain. I watched people like that movie, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, and he is. I think Culkin is.
- [48:55]
John Podhoretz
Culkin is considered a prohibitive favor to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
- [49:02]
Rob Long
We might get a Holocaust movie and the Jews are Nazis movie. But also the other thing about the no Other Land, by the way, is that because it's the collective, we may have to deal with a. We may get an Israeli anti Zionistic or whatever speech. And similar to what we.
- [49:25]
John Podhoretz
Have almost anti Zionist speech. Yeah.
- [49:28]
Rob Long
And that was. And that went over very well.
- [49:30]
John Podhoretz
Oh, yeah, it was really great. It was great for them. I have a piece up today at the Washington Free Beacon, a review of the Brutalist, which is one of the two real front runners for Best Picture and is a very, very complicated, very interesting and I think in the end, very evil movie, which I try to explain because it is, as a producer friend of mine said, maybe the most Zionist movie ever made. Startlingly, it's a movie about a Holocaust survivor comes to America and eventually ends up in Israel. But I won't. Spoiler alert. He ends up in Israel. But why he ends up in Israel is that America is so awful that he needs a refuge from America, that Israel was created to provide Jews in America living with the horrors of anti Semitism to Flee to the Middle east because they need refuge from evil capitalists and anti Semites who thought it was.
- [50:35]
Seth Mandel
The most Zionist movie ever made.
- [50:37]
John Podhoretz
Well, it is very pro Israel.
- [50:40]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. I would say it's number two after the Ten Commandments.
- [50:44]
John Podhoretz
Well, an exodus, but I mean, so in this atmosphere, having a movie where it's like. Like, we're gonna go to Israel and there's a sort of celebration. There's a scene where you see the creation of the state of. Is the celebrations of the creation of the state of Israel in 19. 1948 and all that. Anyway, it's a. But I don't know.
- [51:05]
Seth Mandel
Nothing beats Charlton Heston. The Lord your God. That's pretty great.
- [51:10]
John Podhoretz
He doesn't talk about Israel.
- [51:12]
Seth Mandel
Well, it's applied when you cross the. You know, when you cross the Red Sea, you're going to 1 1.
- [51:18]
Rob Long
One Direction.
- [51:18]
John Podhoretz
Moses. Moses doesn't get there.
- [51:20]
Seth Mandel
You're not going to the Amon resort.
- [51:22]
John Podhoretz
Dies on the promontory. Being allowed into the Holy Land. Who's your. Who's your messiah now? Billy Crystal's imitation of Edward G. Robinson. Yeah, Edward G. Robinson. So anyway, that's. That's a Zionist movie, but very anti American. Okay, so we got that. And then we have Anora, which is the sex worker is a person too.
- [51:54]
Seth Mandel
I think Anora is the sensational. To me that Nora is a good movie, but it's also. It feels like a movie. It's about, like. It's a little dangerous. It's got some crime in it. It's got some scary spooks. It's got some sex in it. It's like. It is a picture. Like, what do you want, a roadmap, as they say in Barton Fink, you know, Tony Chalhoub looks at John Turturro, signed to do a wrestling movie, and tutor is asking about it because it's a wrestling picture. What do you want, a road map? It's like, come on, it's a movie. Like, it's got a thing and a guy and she's scary. It's scary. And it's like mobsters and stuff. It's good. Like, make them more. More anora. They should, if they should give Anora all the awards so that people say to themselves, you know what? No more sad movies about Zionist architects. All due respect, make the movie the thing. People in the thing. I mean, even Conclave, which I loved, was, you know, he could lose 12 minutes.
- [52:50]
John Podhoretz
Conclave is beautiful to look at. It does literally have the worst ending of any movie I've ever Seen. But that's okay.
- [52:57]
Seth Mandel
I liked it.
- [52:58]
John Podhoretz
That's okay. You like the ending. Okay, well, a twist. It's a. I will tell you this story.
- [53:06]
Seth Mandel
I will tell you this story. The spoiler alert. If you haven't seen Conclave, I'm sorry, but I was at a table reading years ago when the Crying Game was in the theaters. I hadn't seen it. And I'm sitting there with my coffee. It's like, Wednesday morning, we're all talking about, ready to start. And then to my movies. And Ted Danson says to me, he goes, hey, have you seen Crying Game? And I said, no, I'm excited. He goes, yeah, it's really great. Really great. And she plays a good part. She is really good. Okay, now I don't have to see this movie because, like, I know exactly what you're trying to tell me, like, you idiot. But he thought he was being, you know, ruining the movie for me. So at no point in the Crying Game was I surprised because Ted Danson gave it away. Trump is his anecdote now done for the day.
- [53:56]
John Podhoretz
Two. Two. Spoiler. Two historical spoiler experiences. Okay. One, went to see Murder on the Orient Express, the original with Albert Finney and Everybody.
- [54:08]
Seth Mandel
Oh, yeah.
- [54:09]
John Podhoretz
1974, 59th street and Third Avenue. Long line outside the theater waiting to get. When that used to be a thing. And there were exit doors on 59th street between 3rd and 2nd where people, when the movie was over, came out of the exit doors. And you were online and you basically had to cut. Cut a path so people could come out. We're all saying they're waiting. It's. I think it's Christmas Day, so it's kind of cold. People walk out. Somebody walks out, looks everybody and goes, they all did it.
- [54:40]
Rob Long
I.
- [54:41]
Seth Mandel
Okay, I was.
- [54:42]
John Podhoretz
We should have beaten him to death.
- [54:43]
Seth Mandel
I was 13 years old in line at the North Point Theater in San Francisco to see the premiere of the Empire Strikes Back. Somebody coming out of the 11am show said, Darth Vader's Luke Skywalker's father.
- [54:57]
John Podhoretz
Yeah.
- [54:57]
Seth Mandel
Okay. Well, yeah.
- [54:59]
John Podhoretz
And the second one was, I was sitting with my friend Judith Regan, the famous publisher.
- [55:04]
Seth Mandel
Sure.
- [55:05]
John Podhoretz
In 1998 or something like that. Going to see the Sixth Sense. And Judith, a very, very, very intelligent and careful close reader of things we're watching, and it's about 15 minutes in, and she says to me, bruce Willis is a ghost.
- [55:25]
Rob Long
While you're watching the movie.
- [55:27]
Seth Mandel
While you're watching it out.
- [55:29]
John Podhoretz
Okay.
- [55:29]
Seth Mandel
Once you figured it out, that's fair.
- [55:31]
John Podhoretz
You know, when you. When you when you have that experience, it's almost irrepressible because you're like, I got it. You know, it's like, I solved the puzzle. I know what. I know what the pangram is. Do you want to know what the pangram is? Anyway. All right, Rob Long, you gotta go.
- [55:46]
Seth Mandel
I gotta run. I'm sorry.
- [55:47]
John Podhoretz
Say we gotta go, too. Have a good weekend, everybody. Watch or don't watch the Oscars. Start getting ready to write angry emails to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. If bad stuff happens about Israel, please do that. It actually does make a huge difference. Tweet it. Go on social media. Do all of that. Make them feel bad. Make them worry.
- [56:07]
Abe Greenwald
Rob, don't close out.
- [56:09]
John Podhoretz
Rob. Rob. I won't. I won't. Just. Okay. And we're gonna go. So that. That is. That is our story. For Abe and Seth, I'm John Pothorz. Keep the candle burning.